Spike Milligan and his partners in anarchy may have gone to the Great Studio in the Sky but The Goon Show must go on. On Saturday it will be exactly 60 years since the first episode of one of the most influential radio shows of all time.
To celebrate, survivors of that talented showbiz generation will join fans for a Special Goons Day at the pub in central London which saw the birth of the weekly outpouring of surreal laughs and explosions. They will unveil a plaque and hear a message from Prince Charles, Goon fan, and patron of the Goon Show Preservation Society.
"The Goon Show 1951-1960 first exploded here," the plaque will declare on the exterior wall of the Strutton Arms (then called Grafton's), listing also the names and caricatures of the humorists who made it go bang: Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine.
The man who lit the blue touchpaper was Jimmy Grafton, publican, scriptwriter and Secombe's manager. He installed a small stage upstairs in the pub, edited the material and finally nagged a nervous BBC into signing up the gang.
"We had Spike Milligan living in the attic, with a monkey in the next room," recalled Grafton's son, James, who was eight when he watched the rehearsal of the first in the series of Those Crazy People, as the show was named when it hit the airwaves on 28 May 1951.
No recording exists of that groundbreaking broadcast but the script survives, and after the unveiling ceremony it will be re-enacted by members of the Goon Show Preservation Society.
Despite Bentine soon leaving and a decade of nerves on the part of the BBC, The Goon Show ran until The Last Smoking Seagoon, the episode that brought down the curtain in January 1960, after 10 series and about 250 shows. Among the classic scripts were The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler, The Affair of the Lone Banana, and The House of Teeth.
"It was a huge cult," said John Repsch, chairman of the preservation society. With a speaking trumpet hired for the occasion, he will be leading the celebration. "Schoolboys used to listen and on the following day they'd be acting it out, with the funny voices, in the playground."
Two of those schoolboys later went on to create Monty Python's Flying Circus. "Without the Goons I probably wouldn't have had the confidence to be silly," Michael Palin said. Terry Jones agreed: "We were trying to do on TV what the Goons did on radio: create a free-wheeling, fantasy, world. I always thought the Goons had the advantage over us: they could tow the British Isles across the Atlantic to make them closer to America."
On hand this weekend to share the memories will be Marcel Stellman, who produced The Ying-Tong Song and other Goons hit singles, and the playwright John Antrobus, who co-wrote scripts with Milligan. Charles Chilton, creator of the sci-fi series Journey into Space, and producer of early Goon shows, will be joining in the Q&A session on Goonish arcana.
Prince Charles is proud to declare himself "someone who grew up to the sounds of The Goon Show on the steam-driven wireless". He said, on missing the recording of the reunion Goon show in 1972: "My hair turned green with envy and my knees fell off." That 1970s performance led to the formation of the society, when members of the audience got together in a pub afterwards. "They said, 'we can't let this be the end of the Goons', so they founded the society," said Les Drew, who runs the society's website. "Now there are members all over the world. There's a lady who has flown over this week from America. It's not just an appreciation society, it's a preservation society."
Repsch said: "One of the beauties of The Goon Show is, it hasn't dated. It'll still be on the rampage in a 100 years' time."